Friday, March 29, 2013

Good Friday reflections on anger

Pontius
Pilate was an angry man. Although Scripture does not explicitly paint that
portrait, the biblical clues consistently point toward an angry Pilate:

·Crucifixion
was how the Romans executed criminals. The Jews could only execute people for
blasphemy, and then they imposed the sentence by stoning.

·All
four gospels record that Jesus died by crucifixion, an ugly death offensive to
devout Jews. If Jesus had died some other way, Christians would have assuredly preserved
some hint of his dying in an alternative manner. Just the opposite is the case.
The New Testament authors work hard, twisting passages out of context, to show
the Jewish scriptures foreshadowing the messiah dying on a cross, e.g., Galatians
3:13.

·Depictions
of Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for Jesus' death are
unbelievable. No Roman governor could disavow responsibility and hope to preserve
the public respect and fear upon which Roman rule depended. Pilate disowning
responsibility more likely reflects a literary attempt to make Jesus' story palatable
to Romans and Roman authority. By the time the gospels were written, few additional
Jews were accepting the idea that Jesus was the Messiah. Christianity's future
was plainly among the Gentiles, not the Jews.

·The
sign that Pilate allegedly ordered attached to Jesus' cross – The King of the Jews – highlights the
reason that Pilate ordered Jesus' death. Pilate regarded Jesus as an
insurrectionist who plotted to overthrow Roman rule, wanting to replace it with
himself as king of an independent Jewish kingdom.

·The
threat that Jesus purportedly posed to Roman authority in general, and Pilate's
authority in particular, angered Pilate. When threatened, humans react with a
fight or flight response. Pilate was not about to flee, yielding his province to
some petty rebel. And had Pilate found this option tempting, the sobering
reality of imperial accountability would have caused him to abandon the idea
immediately. No. Jesus' perceived rebellious defiance would have triggered the
fight response, angering Pilate and sealing Jesus' fate.

·Alternatively,
Pilate may have been a sadist or sociopath who ordered Jesus to die because he
enjoyed exercising his power to have people killed. Or, perhaps Pilate was so emotionally
detached that life and death decisions did not affect him. But these hypotheses
seem much less likely, and fit the existing data less well, than does the
theory that Pilate was angry.

Anger
is a defensive reaction that expresses frustration at one's lack of control
over people or situations. Anger readily translates into aggressive behavior
directed at the perceived source of frustration, whether self, another person,
or even an inanimate object. And if afraid to direct anger at the actual cause
of frustration, a person will channel their anger in a different direction.

Typified
by Pilate ordering Jesus' death, sinful anger destroys rather than creates
life. Ironically, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified anger as the second stage in
the grief process. Unable to restore life to the deceased, the bereaved become
angry with the deceased for abandoning them.

Obviously,
not all anger is sin. Righteous anger is an appropriate response to injustice
that threatens harm. Psychologists have discovered that anger floods the brain
with a chemical that heightens alertness, improves thinking, and enhances
physical abilities. In other words, the distinction between righteous anger and
sinful anger is that sinful anger destroys life whereas righteous anger helps
to preserve it.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

"...Or, perhaps Pilate was so emotionally detached that life and death decisions did not affect him."

I find it much easier to believe this explanation. I wouldn't think a Roman Governor would give a hoot about one individual (poor, ragged) alleged insurrectionist. I don't think Jesus would be enough of a threat to generate anger.

Of course, being a detached killer is no less eveil -- perhaps more evil -- than being an angry killer.